Visual Studies graduate courses
Syllabi
To view syllabi and course materials for current and previous classes, see the Class Notes section.
Course List
ART COURSES
VS 500 Neuroaesthetics
Spring 2009:
Instructor: Barbara Stafford
Registration #255518
Works of art as visual, acoustic, haptic, gustatory, and olfactory forms, mobilized in space and time, constitute a vast repertory of non-linguistic types of communication. These content-bearing object-events make a direct impact on human physiology precisely because they evoke and provoke deep corporeal resonances. Dance, music, architecture, sculpture, painting, film, performance, installation, and Web art variously do something with our bodies, and signify through some kind of bodily action, and such corporeal articulation has emerged as integral to research on the embodied, embedded, and distributed aspects of cognition from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to Andy Clark. This action view of perceptual processes as inherently performative assumes a tight coupling between our motor movements and sensory perception. Additionally, affect, human memory capacity, feature-extraction, pattern recognition or matching all entail a view of the brain-mind continuum and how it is hooked into the feeling, phenomenal body.
In this seminar, then, we will take on extensive and sophisticated analyses of the cognitive work of images, especially their equational structure or correlational role in joining neural activities with social reality. We will investigate how the computational, symbol-generating, feature-extracting, modular and chemical brain can, in fact, be integrated with the first-person, value-driven, empathetic, and environmentally – attuned self as well as explore how images enable mental activities to cross corporeal boundaries to shape our surroundings.
ART 502 TACTICAL MEDIA
This course is designed to bring artists from various specializations together to discuss methods and possibilities for independent public art activities, and to experiment with soft interventions in locations not typically accessed by artists. Particular attention will be paid to process (as opposed to product), to what can be created, organized, and/or produced outside of the artist’s studio, and to engaging the immediate and specific qualities of a given socio-phenomenological field.
ART 513 GRADUATE PHOTOGRAPHY CRITIQUE
Seminar that is a special study and research leading to a comprehensive presentation in photography. Class meets once a week and is a three credit course.
ART 525 INTERACTIVE COMPUTER ART
This studio course is designed to facilitate students in exploring emerging practices in computer-based interactive forms. Students will be exposed to emerging technological tools (hardware and/or software) of particular relevance to experimental artistic practice via a series of classroom demonstrations and short workshops. Short reading assignments and presentations of work by contemporary artists will contextualize use of these tools and techniques. The primary focus of the course is on facilitating students to develop a self-directed, conceptually and technologically sophisticated final project. The broader objective is to equip students with an understanding of methodologies of technological engagement that will empower their future artistic endeavors.
ART 573 PERFORMATIVE ACTION
Performance art has long had a simultaneously humble and impolite history as an interdisciplinary art form that straddles public art, installation, body art, theatre, dance, music, writing and the practice of intervention. As deliberate action, situation, event, non-event, or relational practice, it is an art form that has always come closest to blurring the line between art and life. Its currency lies in its capacity to be utilized in the most extreme, urgent, and quotidian of situations. This course explores the history and social contexts of embodiment, audience interactions, situated interventions and art/life encounters.
ART 576 - GRADUATE TOPICS IN PRINTMAKING
Graduate Topics in Printmaking combines a seminar format (reading, research, discussion and presentation) with a studio/lab format. For the seminar portion (approximately 25% of the course), topics of relevance to contemporary cultural practice (not just printmaking) will be selected by the instructor. For the studio portion (approximately 75%) students will formulate, research, contextualize and execute a self-directed print project. Students will have access to all print labs and equipment (intaglio, litho, screen, inkjet, book, typeset and relief). Since the focus of this course is not technical instruction, it will be necessary for students to have a basic understanding of the processes they will be using. Since topics change each semester, this course is repeatable for credit..
ART 587 REAL-SPACE ELECTRONIC ART
This course is designed to introduce graduate students to basic principles of electronics and microcontroller programming, and to enable them to create self-generated art projects using interactive electronic technologies. Such skills will allow students to get “beyond the box”: To create interactive works that do not require the computer monitor as an output device or the mouse for input. It is expected that the skills learned in this course will be immensely valuable to students in subsequent courses or independent working interactive and installation art, and will offer them the opportunity to integrate interests in sculpture and object-based art, into their computer art practices.
ART 598 Supervised Teaching
Instruction in college-level teaching and helps in the development of a syllabus, course structure and preparation. The course also covers the special problems associated with teaching art courses, such as organizing critiques, grading student work, and evaluating student development. Course is one credit and is required for all Teaching Assistants within the art department.
ART 599 First Year Graduate Research
Independent Study Tutorial for first year graduate students previously accepted to the MFA program. Students are expected to be self directed and to complete a body of studio based research/production per written proposal, which is required and must be approved at the start of the semester. Meeting times are arranged. Register for 1-6 credits per graduate faculty member. This course may be repeated.
ART 666 Art Management Internship
This course familiarizes students with actual working conditions and expectations of professional positions, while providing professional on-location experience. Students are assigned to art galleries, cultural institutions or businesses within the university or the community to receive hands-on experience. Course includes fieldwork and research. Students are required to work within their specific area(s) of interest on projects outside of the department. The course is 3 credits and time is arranged.
ART 690 Graduate Project Supervision
This course is an individual study and research course leading to a comprehensive presentation with a specific studio emphasis in preparation for the Master’s exhibition. Time is arranged between the student and the faculty member, and may be registered for 2 – 6 credits.
ART 699 Second Year Graduate Research
Independent Study Tutorial for second year graduate students previously accepted to the MFA program. Students are expected to be self directed and to complete a body of studio based research/production per written proposal, which is required and must be approved at the start of the semester. Meeting times are arranged. Register for 1-6 credits per graduate faculty member. This course may be repeated. Prerequisite: 2nd year graduate standing in the Art department or permission of instructor.
VISUAL STUDIES COURSES
VS 500 TOPICS IN VISUAL STUDIES
A seminar in topics in Visual Studies, topics rotate every semester.
VS 501 INTRODUCTION TO VISUAL STUDIES
This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of Visual Studies. Using the transition from an industrialized modern to an electronic postmodern society as a frame of reference, we examine and discuss wide range of approaches to the creation and interpretation of visual experience. We consider the many ways that paintings, photographs, films, fashions, and everyday objects both shape and are shaped by the concepts, values, and meanings that constitute cultural life in contemporary urban societies. Students develop the skills necessary to write effectively about the visual world and to think productively about the creation of images and the meanings that surround them.
VS 504 ART, LITERATURE & AESTHETICS
This course is designed for incoming graduates in the Department of Visual Studies MFA program. It will Provide students with a general familiarity with key concepts that have proven useful to artists in their processes of creating work and in self- criticism of it. The class will focus on the use one can make of the material and how research and reflection have become key elements of artistic practice.
VS 518 TACTICS OF PRAXIS
This course builds a theoretical framework for future-focused practices particularly in the context of emerging communications and entertainment technologies, political formations and market trends. Key theoretical approaches investigated include Felix Guattari’s elaboration of “Pragmatics”, Bruno Latour’s“Actor-Network-Theory”, and Geert Lovink’s and David Garcia’s essays on “Tactical Media.” These theoretical texts are investigated alongside varied contemporary writings on strategic public relations, information design, and product marketing as well as institutional “case-studies” that might be used as examples. This is a course in tactics of communication, production and distribution that is designed tube immensely useful to theorists and practitioners as well as definers and designers of visual culture.
VS 521 INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORY
In this course students will develop introductory understanding of the variety of methods and subjects of contemporary critique of representation. We will read key texts of major figures in contemporary critical theory and consider critiques of representation through the study of spectacle, simulation, cultural action as well as psychoanalysis, semiotics and poststructuralism. The goal will be to locate as many critical tools as possible for use in the student’s own work.
VS 525 DESIGNED PLAY
Designed Play will focus on the changing role of “play” and its impact on contemporary cultural production as a design medium. Questions surrounding how we currently define play – is it aimless, productive, meaningful – and how the current production of “play” and the use of game-based models in both consumer, educational and corporate culture is shifting the boundaries between work and leisure will be explored. In our exploration of designed play and its cultural impact we will look at early theories of childhood play, edutainment including interactive public exhibitions for museums and educational environments, corporate cultural contexts, current marketing and advertising models that employ play, the culture and economy of computer video gaming including online social network games such as “Second Life” and “World of Warcraft” and their emerging virtual economies (gold farming, etc).
VS 534 BODY CRITICISM
This seminar will introduce students to theoretical work in the analysis of representations of the body. Major topics to be considered by the course are imaging/imagining the whole body; representations of the body in pieces and desire, violence, trauma and health/pathology; embodiment and subjectivity; inside/outside; surface/depth; race; gender/sexual identity; life/death. The class may consider images from the arts, science and medicine and will cover a variety of media: sculpture, painting, prints, photography, film, video, digital media, and—of course—the body itself.
VS 550 ART & PSYCHOANALYSIS
Although psychoanalysts and academics are often drawn to the same painting, film or play, their approaches commonly use psychoanalysis differently and address different audiences. Until now, conversations between these three worlds of psychoanalysis, the academy, and the creative arts have rarely taken place. Such conversations will form the basis of Art and Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Lacan and will enable the student to bring this discussion into such fields as film and television, literature, drama and poetry, the visual arts, and biography. Through these conversations, Art and Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Lacan will bring together the worlds of psychoanalysis, the visual world, and the creative arts and should be of interest to all those interested in psychoanalysis and culture.
VS 579 REVOLUTIONARY SUBLIME
This seminar investigates the visual art that arose from revolutionary tensions between theory and everyday life in key European and American political upheavals starting with the French Revolution and continuing on up through contemporary social change. This course of study is intended to illuminate the unsettling allure of an uncompromising revolutionary sublime, often manifest in phantasmagorical artistic representations that underlie utopian visions. The course will undertake an extensive exploration of the philosophical pretexts for such ideas moving from Rousseau to Hegel to Marx to Nietzsche and so on up to Baudrillard and Deleuze.
VS 580 ART DISCOURSE & DECONSTRUCTION
This is a graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar in Continental Aesthetic Philosophy as it applies to contemporary art regardless of the medium. This course will critically examine, from a philosophical perspective, the general analytical methods of the poststructuralist thinkers Michel Foucault (the Discourse part of the course) and Jacques Derrida (the Deconstruction part of the course) for the contemporary artist. Through a close-grained examination of relevant texts from Foucault and Derrida as well as an array of selections from other theorists as contained in the reading pack we will engage the crucial question of what is art? A crucial subset of this question will be the addition quandary of what is photography? The seminar will then proceed to develop a way of thinking about both art and photography that can account for the complex, cultural and historical problems that surround them.
VS 590 THEORIES OF MONTAGE
Since the early twentieth century, montage – the practice of creating new images by cutting and pasting images from photographs, postcards, magazines and newspapers – has been promulgated as a privileged medium of representation in the context of modernity. This has been the case not only in avant-garde art but also in advertising, film, and even, as best exemplified by the work of Walter Benjamin, in the writing of history and philosophy. Crossing borders between mass culture and traditions of the avant-garde, recontextualizing the objects of everyday life and making the familiar strange, montage challenges its viewers to make meaning out of a disjunctive array of visual fragments. Photomontage can be understood as a materialization of trauma and psychic shock related to the experiences of war, or as an ironic tool of political rebellion; in its capacity to create plausible visual fictions, montage has also been the medium of advertisers and propagandists. This course sets out to examine historical approaches to the theorizing of montage and the more recent, broad-based reconsideration of the place of this once marginal form in the history of twentieth-century and contemporary art. The course is structured around a series of key historical periods and art movements in which the iconography of fragmentation came to play a crucial role and for which theories of montage enable a deeper understanding.
VS 625 INSTANT IMAGE: SNAPSHOT TO TELEPRESENCE
This course looks at time and the image, or more accurately, the speed of light and the image. We will begin with the development of the instantaneous photograph (snapshot) and chronophotography around 1880 and move forward to consider the introduction of cinema, television and video, radar, surveillance satellites, the Internet and other present-day telecommunications technologies. Henri Bergson’s philosophy of time and Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity will be examined in working through the experiences of modern temporality. Artistic explorations of time in images will be emphasized (e.g., Cubism, Futurism, Expanded Cinema, Video Art). Students will also consider possible implications of new imaging technologies through theoretical critiques that link the instantaneous picture, for example, to shock (Benjamin), catastrophe (Doane), trauma (De Duve), accident (Virilio), and the end of history (Baudrillard).
ART HISTORY COURSES
AHI 508 STUDIES IN ANCIENT ART
This course deals with the relation and interaction of text with image. The course will introduce the student to Homer's Iliad, Odyssey and several Greek plays as well as representations of these literary works in Greek wall painting, vase painting and sculpture.
AHI 541 TOPICS IN CHINESE PAINTING
The “Wall” is particularly significant to Chinese history and culture, because it is not only a fundamental Element of classic Chinese architecture, but also constitutes a spatial system that reflects the Chinese mentality. This system is unique to Chinese culture and is made of all types of walls including grand historical structure such as the Great Wall and the various inner city walls, as well as the walls in courtyards and the paper screens displayed in living rooms. Since these walls are not simple objects and they carry an original voice that speaks for Chinese people’s history and daily lives, contemporary Chinese artists are often inspired by the image/concept of the “Wall.” Through lectures, reading and discussion this seminar course will investigate how Chinese artists attempt to transform the physical forms a well as the notion of the traditional “Wall” into a contemporary practice.
AHI 548 HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
This course will examine major movements and practitioners of photography from its beginnings in the 1830s to the present. Students will develop critical analysis skills as we engage this medium which – even today, in its most recent, digital incarnations – has come to dominate our pictorial experience. From early portraits by commercial photographers and family intimates to the rise of radical avant-gardes in the 1920s, and from the constructed visions of 19th- and 20th-century social reformers to today’s manipulated “Post-Photography,” the photographic image draws our attention and makes claims to its own veracity like no other visual form. In addition to providing an introduction to key photographers and movements in their historical and cultural contexts, this course will also teach students to think theoretically and write critically about photographic images.
AHI 552 STUDIES IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE — WRIGHT’S DARWIN D. MARTIN HOUSE
This course will consider Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin D. Martin House as the Creation of a Historic House Museum. The Martin House is one of three large-scale, multiple-building complexes among the sixty prairie houses designed by Wright between 1900 and 1910. The study of the Martin House will engage five important disciplines: architecture, architectural history, historic preservation, and museum studies and marketing/arts management.
AHI 553 HISTORICAL PRESERVATION — FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
In this seminar we will examine the period of transition from modernism to postmodernism in architecture, from the 1960s to the early 1980s. We will look at the modern movement in architecture (19th century to the 1960s) and then consider the events, writings and works that signaled the demise of modernism. Following that we will concentrate upon ideas, works and practitioners that emerged in the 1970s.
AHI 580 MUSEUM STUDIES I
The purpose of this course is to gain an understanding of the purpose, function and organization of art museums and to introduce managerial and curatorial skills and techniques essential to museum work. Writing assignments are intended to have students carefully examine works of art, compile information about works of art, describe works of art and express opinions and ideas about works of art.
AHI 581 MUSEUM STUDIES II
This course examines the evolution, function, organization and architecture of museums as cultural institutions as well as a collection of events concerning the evolution of human history. It will closely study number of important museums, with a concentration on their mission, development, curatorial approach, exhibitions, organization and collection-building.
AHI 585 THE MUSEUM AND THE OTHER
This seminar will deal with the history of museum up to contemporary perspective of curatorial practice with an emphasis on marginalized cultures and art. The politics of display, representational issues of the Other, and Postcolonial theory will be discussed based on exhibition practice over the last century.
AHI 588 DISPLAYING GENDER: CONSTRUCTING FEMININITIES & MASCULINITIES IN MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
This course brings together two of the most significant strains of recent art historical scholarship: the study of gender in representation and the critical examination of exhibitions and museums. Focusing on key examples of curatorial practice from the late nineteenth century to the present day, students will be encouraged to think about femininities and masculinities on display as manifestations of gendered stereotypes and ideals. Through readings, museum visits, class discussions and guided individual research, questions of gender in exhibitions will be considered in relation to other aspects of identity including sexuality, race and class. In the course’s seminar setting, we will consider the ways in which public exhibitions function as sites of display for certain gendered norms and anxieties and as places for cultural and countercultural identities to make they visible.
AHI 590 METHODS OF ART HISTORY
This seminar is designed to enhance students’ understanding of art history by identifying and analyzing the various conventions, approaches and developments underlying this discipline. We will look at various modes of criticism, including humanism, empiricism, formalism, Marxism, social history, cultural studies, structuralism, deconstruction, post-structuralism, and discuss their significance to the production and interpretation of art. The Methods of Art History will examine the disciplinary boundaries of Visual Studies a more recent strategy for considering art.
AHI 594 LANDSCAPE: THEORY AND PRACTICE
This course will carefully review existing scholarship, criticism and theory in elaborating an up-to-date overview and methodology for approaching the development of landscape as a cultural phenomenon during the modern era. As a cultural construction, landscape, whether physical or artistic, is essentially a reproduction of spatial practices and perceptions that are determined by syntagmatic relations. Hence, the study of landscape might be based upon an approach that examines the general structures that underlie the many forms of spatial reproduction through which experience is articulated. Recent trends in the study of the relationship between gardens, designed landscapes and landscape painting have tended to focus on the role of spatial images and representations in the production and dissemination of knowledge about the material world. Art and architectural historians, social historians, cultural geographers, sociologists and anthropologists have viewed landscape as both a cultural form and a social practice, a natural sign and a mode of cultural signification, one that produces and is in turn a product of a complex set of historical, economic and political relations. Given the range of interpretive strategies for the study of landscape, it is no wonder that it has been difficult to discern within the field a unifying method or set of underlying principles that might determine what we study and how. The purpose of this course is to discover a general method for the study of landscape by uncovering the common structures that organize the various forms of spatial representation, which include but are not limited to gardens and designed landscapes, landscape painting, photography, as well as site specific art.
